[celdon25]

Elon is brilliant when it comes to hardware. But unfortunately with xAI, he went on a firing spree, PayPal Mafia style, just like with Twitter when he bought it, shortly before doing another hiring drive, and failing to hire software engineers at scale.

The datacenter deals came after. But now, the man who promised the world an AI system that defends free speech and is “pro-human”, is instead selling to his competitors and lowering the daily app usage limits of his own Grok by an order of magnitude (really).

If you’re dealing with the world’s richest man, you can predict that money will come before other concerns despite other rhetoric. Interesting strategy though!

Edit: To be fair, they did decide that hardware was "the bottleneck" according to an interview I saw last year. But I firmly believe they underestimated the software problem (and their app was/is riddled with them).

[CamperBob2]

He didn't go on a firing spree at xAI. A lot of talented people who could go anywhere else and work with anyone else in the AI field did just that.

[top_sigrid]

> Elon is brilliant when it comes to hardware.

What shall that even mean?

[cooper_ganglia]

Tesla, Falcon 9, Starlink, Mechazilla, SolarCity, Colossus, Neuralink, Starship, Optimus...

[tpetry]

SolarCity pretty much failed. Wasnt there an article recently that their projects per year is super low?

[jayd16]

Tesla is the only profitable example in that list?

[winfredJa]

Optimus seriously.

[missedthecue]

Every product adoption success he's had since PayPal has been hardware.

[CamperBob2]

And in a market where the incumbents were either incompetent or didn't bother to show up to the game.

I don't understand why people don't call that out more, when Musk rambles endlessly about how he's going to reinvent data centers and semiconductor fabs.